Google taken to court by a Chinese author

by on December 17th, 2009

The search giant Google is taken to court by a Chinese author Mian Mian who has attracted a large crowd of youngsters by writing about life with drugs among prostitutes, gangsters and failed artists. This sues Google for alleged copyright infringement.

Milan

Mian Mian filed a complaint over the internet giant scanning her works without permission on 23rd October. She is asking for Google to apologise for scanning part of her works, delete the scanned content from its digital library and pay her Rmb60,000 ($8,800) in compensation, her lawyer Sun Jingwei told the paper. The Haidian People’s Court in Beijing would start hearings on December 29.

This is the first case against Google by a Chinese writer and it adds more risk upon the search giant in building the digital library which could lay the groundwork for an ‘iTunes of books’ and potentially transform the publishing industry.

Last month, US authors’ associations submitted to the US Federal Court a re-worked agreement after the court had demanded adjustments. The US Federal Court will hold a hearing on the agreement in February.Google has scanned more than 10m books from US libraries since 2004 and plans to offer them to online users. Chinese writers’ associations have said that to their knowledge this includes Chinese works by 570 authors.

Let us listen to Google now,

Google said it had taken the author’s book offline and that it was “confident of a favourable outcome in this case”. A third round of talks between the company and copyright associations is expected, it said.“Google Books is fully compliant with US and Chinese law,” it said in a statement. “In China like everywhere else, if a book is in copyright we don’t show more than a few snippets of text without the permission of the rights holder.”

Image credit : topnews.in,teamnirvana.com,ft.com

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